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Early Scientific Revolution
The era of the '''Early Scientific Revolution' lasted from about 1547 AD until 1598 AD. It began with the end of the reign of Henry VIII of England, when his three children tempered the English Reformation into its final form. It then ended with the Edict of Nantes, which finally settled the French Wars of Religion. What has been called a Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th century, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the universe, nature, and ourselves. Although the work of medieval scientists was by no means as stagnant and uncreative as it was once the fashion to believe, it suffered from critical limitations. A number of truths produced by Biblical study and ancient Greco-Roman authorities were accepted without questions. Thus, like the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution was another break from accepted religious teachings. It is traditionally assumed to start with Nicolaus Copernicus' 1543 work on the heliocentric model of the solar system. The changed attitude of scientific inquiry largely came from Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who popularised the Scientific Method and Rationalism. The capstone of the Scientific Revolution would be laid by Isaac Newton's seminal work, Principia (1687), ''that finally provided the physical explanation of the Copernican universe, and brought together terrestrial and celestial knowledge. Much of the work done in this period is still considered today as the foundation of the major fields of modern science, from astronomy to mathematics, physics to chemistry, and medicine to botany. Meanwhile, European politics continued to be dominated by religious conflicts of the Protestant Reformation. France's experiment with religious tolerance proved futile as the country descended into the four-decade-long Wars of Religion, from which Henry IV Bourbon emerged on the throne, a former Protestant converted to Catholicism. The English Reformation had to pass through fire, as Henry VIII's daughter Mary took the country back to Catholicism, while his other daughter Elizabeth broke from it again. The religious fissure meanwhile sparked major rebellions against monarchs in the Dutch Netherlands, Scotland, and Ireland, that drew-in neighbours, and ultimately provoked Philip II to launch the Spanish Armada against England. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation era conflicts would culminate in imperial Germany with the Thirty Years' War, one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. History Early Scientific Revolution What has been called a '''Scientific Revolution' (1543-1687) in the 16th and 17th century, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the universe, nature, and ourselves. Its results are still today considered the foundation of all the major fields of modern science, from mathematics to physics, astronomy to chemistry, botany to medicine and biology. The great advances of the period must first and foremost be attributed to the simple cumulative effect of more rapidly and widely circulated ideas through the printing press, as well as the general spread of literacy. Reading and writing, though not universally diffused, gradually became more widespread, no longer the privilege of a small elite, nor intimately connected with religious rites. None the less the fundamental source lies deeper than this, in changed intellectual attitudes. Although the work of medieval scientists had been by no means as stagnant and uncreative as it was once the fashion to believe, it suffered from critical limitations. Much of what was considered known about the natural world dated back to the great medieval synthesis of Christian beliefs, with the teachings of ancient authorities such as Aristotle (d. 322 BC), Ptolemy (d. 170 AD), and Galen (d. 210 AD). The dogmatic assertions that the earth was the centre of the universe, or that four elements - fire, air, earth and water - constituted all things, went unquestioned for centuries. To do otherwise was a challenge to Church orthodoxy, and tantamount to heresy. Thus, like the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution was another break from accepted religious teachings. The drastic change in scientific thought also owed much to the new spirit of inquiry that arose from the Renaissance and Age of Discovery. The quest for realism of Renaissance artists spurring renewed interest in the study of biology and botany. Exploration and celestial navigation spurred the development of better, more accurate astronomical tools, both physical and mathematical, crucial for the advancement of astronomy. Moreover, thinkers wanted to making sense of the vast new geographical knowledge revealed by exploration, as well as many observations and specimens brought back from the newly opened Americas. The Scientific Revolution is traditionally assumed to start with the publication in 1543 of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres ''by Polish astronomer '''Nicolaus Copernicus' (d. 1543). Copernicus was highly educated, studying law, classics, medicine, theology, and painting at universities in Poland and Italy until the age of 30. He passion for astronomy was spurred in Italy, where he befriended the famous astronomer Domenico Maria da Ferrara; he later became his assistant. Upon returning to Poland, he worked as private secretary for his uncle, the bishop of Warmia, which gave him ample time to devote to interest in the orbits of the planets. Copernicus was not a practical astronomer, but a theoretician who studied past observations of the planets. He became increasingly frustrated that the geocentric Ptolemaic model of the solar system with the earth at its centre did not fit with observation, requiring astronomers to resort to ever more convoluted adjustments. Questioning Ptolemy's model, Copernicus became intrigued by the notion of a heliocentric system; in this model the Earth, like all the planets, revolves around the sun. Testing the idea, he founds that it tallied with the observations much more readily than the geocentric theory; the fit was not yet perfect, because Copernicus continued to assume that the planets moved in circular orbits, an error not corrected until Kepler (d. 1630). Copernicus was a devout Christian, and feared his life's work would be ridiculed, or even considered downright blasphemous, so only agreed to publish his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium just before his death in 1543. It proved a major event in the history of science. The idea of a heliocentric universe was far from new: the Ancient Greeks had many rival theories about the cosmos, with Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BC) being the first person known to have proposed such a system; there was a long tradition within Islamic astronomy of criticising Ptolemy, beginning with Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1040) and culminating in Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375); and Frenchman Nicole Oresme (d. 1382) had argued for the same idea 166 years before Copernicus. Indeed some of Copernicus' illustrations are so similar to those in Islamic treatise that it seems implausible that he didn’t have access to them. Thus Copernicus did not so much invent a new idea, as revolutionise scientific thought by bringing it firmly into the mainstream. The next great astronomers were both refugees. Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), a Dane, spent 21-years meticulously observing the heavens out of a laboratory provided to him by the king of Denmark, until his patrons death. The much younger Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) was expelled from the university of Graz in Austria for being a Protestant. Both men ended up in Prague, where Kepler took Copernicus' theory, Brahe's observational data, and combined them with his own significant findings. In Astronomia Nova (1609), he put forward the radical and correct proposition that the planets moved in elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. With this last anomaly removed, the heliocentric system was now unmistakably a simpler explanation of observable phenomena than the Ptolemaic version. For now, the Copernican model still remained a topic of private debate among astronomers in university halls; the Church establishment, guardians of "the truth", was not yet involved. This changed in 1610, when Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) discovered firm proof of that Ptolemaic model was wrong. He had access a recent invention from the Netherlands; the first true optical telescope, tradition credited to Zacharias Janssen (d. 1638). Galileo's observations with the telescope were first published in 1610, in which he proved the existence of up to ten times as many distant stars, that the moon's surface was rough rather than smooth, that the sun itself was revolving, and, most significantly, the Jupiter had moons; these moons could not exist in the Ptolemaic model. It brought Galileo immediate fame; he was invited to Florence by the Medici, and even well received in Rome at first. Feeling encouraged, he published Account and Evidence of the Sun Spots ''(1613), in which he directly stating that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy wrong. This time there was outrage from the Church, culminating in 1616 with the works of Copernicus being condemned as heresy, and Galileo was obliged to abandon such opinions. Nevertheless, years later Galileo was granted permission to publish a comparison of the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, on the strict condition that no conclusion was reached as to the truth of either theory. Galileo prevaricated in the final chapter of ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) as required, but the weight of the argument made the scientific conclusion indisputable. He was subsequently found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition, forced to recant to save his own life, and spent the rest of his days effectively under house arrest. Nevertheless, Copernicus' heliocentric views henceforth dominated scientific thinking. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and other astromomers used experimentation and mathematical calculation to confirm or refute hypothesis; what would later be called the Scientific Method. It was genuinely revolutionary. The foundations of the 17th-century rational approach to obtaining knowledge is generally credited to two men; René Descartes (d. 1650) and Francis Bacon (d. 1626). Descartes advocated carefully breaking down large problems into smaller inquiries by way of incisive questions, and grounding all our ideas in reflection on personal experience and reason, rather than ancient authority and false premises. Bacon observed the misconceptions clung to by scholars, and prioritised the use of a sceptical and methodical approach. His process of reaching the truth from drawing conclusions from specific facts tested experimentally is now called inductive reasoning. The Scientific Method also spead to other fields of inquiry. In philosophy, René Descartes' best known statement, "I think, therefore I am", is a philosophical proof of existence based on the fact that someone capable of thought necessarily exists. In mathematics, perhaps the most important advance of the 16th-century was the invention of logarithms by John Napier (d. 1617). Bonaventura Cavalieri (d. 1647) and multi-talented Rene Descartes also made progress towards the calculus, and added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. In science, William Gilbert (d. 1603) laid the foundations of the theory of magnetism, and is credited with coining the term "electricity". Willebrord Snellius (d. 1626) found the mathematical law of refraction. While attempting to improve the refining of ores, Georg Agricola (d. 1555) removed the mystery associated with chemistry, while an early chemistry textbook by Jean Beguin (d. 1620) contained the first-ever chemical equations, creating the practical base upon which others could build. In medicine, the theories of Galen (d. 210 AD) that had dominated European thinking for over a millennium began to unravel. Andreas Vesalius (d. 1564) was the first prominent surgeon to take a highly controversial approach to understanding the human body; dissect corpses himself. His gigantic work, The Structure of the Human Body (1543), was published in seven volumes including numerous striking illustrations, and corrected hundred's of Galen's misconceptions. The greatest surgeon of the 16th-century, Ambroise Paré (d. 1590), rose from humble origins as a barber's assistant, to a pioneer in surgical techniques for battlefield wounds. He also invented several surgical instruments. The capstone of the Scientific Revolution is usually attributed to Isaac Newton's Principia published in 1687, which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravity, thereby completing the synthesis of a new cosmology. French Reformation France was affected by the Protestant Reformation in a manner different from any other country. Though a devout Catholic, Francis I Valois (1515-47) initially maintained an attitude of tolerance towards French Protestants, who became known as Huguenots. This was in part in a accordance with his own Humanist attitude, but mainly in the hope of turning the hostility between Protestant German princes and his great rival Charles V Habsburg to his own political advantage. This changed with an event known as the Affair of the Placards (1534), when radical Huguenots unwisely indulged in publicly plastering anti-Catholic placards across France; one even reaching the royal apartments, a shocking breach of the king's security. The persecution of Protestants increased, causing some to flee the country, among them a certain John Calvin. Despite this, the number of Protestants in France continued to grow, and by the mid-16th-century, predominantly Catholic France had a substantial Huguenot minority scattered across the country and of all classes, from the lower orders to urban bourgeoisie and to parts of the aristocracy; among them even members of the powerful Bourbon family, a branch of the royal family. French Protestantism thus came to acquire a distinctly political character. Catholic and Protestant noble factions would fight a series of destructive and intermittent conflicts, as much a struggle for power against the centralizing state, as a religious struggle. The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) gained impetus with the unexpected death of Francis' eldest son, Henry II Valois (1547-59), in a jousting tournament. For the next three decades, the throne of France was occupied in turn by Henry's three young sons; Francis II (d. 1560), Charles IX (d. 1574), and Henry III (d. 1589). Real power lay in the regency of their mother, Catherine de' Medici (d. 1589), passionately committed to the Roman Catholic cause. As persecution continued, disaffected Huguenots managed to convince themselves that the young king himself was not really anti-Protestant, and if they liberated him from his mother's influence, then things would get better. This culminated in an attempt to kidnap the king known as the Amboise Conspiracy (1560). The plot was betrayed, and fail, but it convinced many on the Catholic side that the Huguenots were enemies of France. Nevertheless, Catherine's main concern was to retain a balance of power between the factions, which would keep her own family on the throne. To this end, she issued the Edict of Saint-Germain (1562) granting religious tolerance to Huguenots. For many Catholic nobles though this was a step too far, and France soon descended into open hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. After eight-years of intermittent warfare and sectarian atrocities, it became clear that neither side could defeat the other, and peace was agreed in 1570. Catherine de Medici attempted to heal the religious discord of the kingdom, by arranging a marriage between her daughter and Henry Bourbon of Navarre (d. 1610), a member of the Huguenot faction and of a branch of the royal family. The wedding in Paris in August 1572 was of course attended by all the prominent Huguenots, among them Gaspard de Coligny. Despite the recent peace, he was pursuing an alliance between the French Huguenots and Protestant England, a controversial foreign entanglement but understandable in the wake of previous failed peace agreements. Four days after the wedding, an assassin made a failed attempt on Coligny's life; the queen regent has traditionally been blamed, but most modern historians find this improbable. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (24 August 1572), which erupted two days later, has stained Catherine's reputation ever since. Expecting a Huguenot uprising to avenge the attack, she over-reacted and ordered a massacre of any Huguenots left in Paris, including Coligny himself. The bloodbath that followed was soon beyond the control of Catherine or any other leader, as Catholic mods took to the streets. The violence consumed Paris for almost a week, and quickly spread to the province, where it lasted several more weeks, before finally dying down. Perhaps 20,000 Huguenots had been butchered. The massacre marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of leadership, but those who remained were increasingly radicalized. Open hostilities resumed, and even the ascension of Henry III (1574-89) could not stop it; Catherine's third son and France first adult king for 15-years. Henry's reign was the stuff of melodrama. His own youngest brother Francis rebelled against him, and made an alliance with the Huguenots. The brothers did eventually reconcile, shortly before Francis' death in 1584. With the king's bothers all dead, and himself childless, the legitimate heir to the throne was now his brother-in-law and cousin, the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The religious turmoil that had racked France for a decade, was thus tranformed into a succession crisis, known as the War of the Three Henry's (1584-94), between three factions: King Henry III supported by moderate Catholic royalists; Henry of Navarre supported by the Huguenots; and Henry of Guise, the leader of the hardline Catholic League who sought to exclude Protestants from the succession. When the king wasn't battling with the Huguenots funded by Protestant England and the Dutch Netherlands, he was clashing with the Catholic League supported by Catholic Spain. Military battles and civilian bloodshed dragged on for years, until the culmination in 1589 when King Henry III succeeded in having Henry of Guise assassinated. Less than a year later, Henry III was himself murdered in revenge by a Catholic fanatic; with him died the royal house of Valois. It took Henry of Navarre, now Henry IV, several years to conquer his kingdom. Paris, devoutly Catholic and strongly defended, was his main obstacle. Finally realising that there was no prospect of a Protestant king ruling overwhelmingly Catholic France, Henry IV finally brought peace by an unprecedented act in the era of the Protestant Reformation; he agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1593. It may well be that Henry IV never said the famous remark attributed to him, "Paris is well worth a mass", but the sentiment is true to history. , but was one of the first to be restored.]] Acceptance of Henry IV Bourbon (1589-1610) as king was by no means a foregone conclusion. Catholic nobles doubted the sincerity of Henry's conversion, while Protestant hopes were dashed for complete reform of the French Church. To deal with the former, the king declared war on Spain, which funded Catholic opposition. The conflict mostly consisted of military action against Catholic French rebels, though the Spanish launched a concerted offensive, capturing Amiens as well as Calais, which the French had recovered from England in 1558 as part of the Italian Wars. When French recaptured Amiens in September 1587 with heavy Spanish losses, the war quickly petered out. To deal with Protestant opposition, Henry promulgated the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed near equal rights to Huguenots in predominantly Catholic France. Although a landmark step on the path to the modern notions of religious freedom and secularism, the concessions were bitterly resented by the Catholic majority. They would be steadily chipped away at, until the Edict was finally revoked by Louis XIV. Henry was now faced with the task of rebuilding a shattered kingdom and restoring the royal position. In foreign policy, he took a conciliatory approach, negotiating peace and commercial treaties with Spain, England, and the Dutch Netherlands, bringing France 12-years of very productive calm. At home, he was fortunate to have the very capable services of his first minister, Maximilien of Sully. The chief need was to put the state finances on a sound footing, by enforcing existing taxation and eliminating corruption. One innovation was a new tax that allowed royal officials to make their offices inheritable. While there were some negative consequences, it gave officials a stake in strengthening the royal government, and helped keep general taxation relatively low. Having succeeded in building an annual surplus, the money was poured into building roads and bridges, including Pont Neuf in Paris. His most ambitious project was the 35-mile-long Briare Canal, completed in 1642, joining the Seine and Loire rivers; it pioneered a great age of integrated waterway systems. Henry also took steps to promote education, agriculture, industry, and commerce. His vision extended beyond France. The French colonization of North America truly began during his reign, laying the foundations of New France (now Canada). Considered a usurper by some Catholics and a traitor by some Protestants, Henry survived numerous assassination attempts, before being murder in a Paris street in 1610 by a Catholic whose precise motives are unclear. He gained more admirers after his death. The "Good King Henry" was remembered for his geniality, and great concern about the welfare of his subjects. He was also known as the "Green Gallant" for his numerous mistresses. When Henry IV died, he had had six children by his second wife in the previous nine years, a remarkable achievement considering he had at least nine more illegitimate children with four different mistresses. He was succeeded by his nine-years-old son Louis XIII. Dutch Reformation During the Middle Age, the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands) were an ill-defined patchwork of squabbling petty-duchies, some linked with France and other with imperial Germany. Nevertheless the region prospered, with the inland cities renowned as cloth-towns, while those on the coast thrived as part of the Hanseatic League, the long-distance Baltic-North Sea trade network. The first rulers to achieve some kind of unity were the dukes of Burgundy, until the death of Charles the Bold (d. 1477) saw the Low Countries fall into the hands of the Habsburgs. There was a growing sense of resentment at their overlord during the long-reign of Charles V Habsburg (d. 1556), Europe’s most powerful monarch. He spent much of his life travelling in far-flung parts of his empire, or ruling from Spain, while frequently demanding taxes to finance his many wars. Charles had personal links with the Low Countries - he was born in Ghent and ruled initially from Brussels - and this no doubt contributed to the relative calm which prevails until his abdication. Meanwhile the ideas of the Reformation began to have influence in the Low Countries early on; already in 1523, the first Protestant was burned at Brussels. Matters came to a head when Philip II Habsburg (1556-98) came to the throne in Spain and Portugal, as well as the Low Countries. During Philip's reign, the Spanish empire reached the height of its influence and power, but he faced many challenges: he had little understanding of local sensitivities in the Low Countries; he inherited huge debts from his father's wars, and was plagued by financial problems, until the arrival of bullion from the New World late in his reign;h he had a tendency to micromanage, leading to weeks of delay in action being taken; and was a zealous defender of Catholicism, aggravating religious tensions. The division of Charles V's vast empire between Philip in Spain and his uncle Ferdinand in imperial Germany also created problems. Spain and the Low Countries were culturally very different; the Spanish steeped in the spirit of Reconquista and colonial acquisitions, and the Dutch in the culture of the Renaissance and mercantilism. There were also practical difficulties in moving forces between Spain and the Low Countries, around the Atlantic coast of traditionally hostile France, and through the narrow Channel; neutrality on the English side was essential. From the start, tensions steadily grew among the Dutch nobility, hostile to centralising reforms and to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition in stifling dissent. But in August 1566, these quarrels were overtaken by events, when a small group of radical Protestants went on a rampage known as the Iconoclastic Fury, in which over 400 churches had their Catholic statuary, decorations, and stained-glass smashed. Philip's response was severe, dispatching the duke of Alba to restore order by any means necessary. A veteran of many campaign, Alba introduced a reign of terror in the Low Countries; after arresting and summarily executing the two leading dissident nobles, he set up what became known in the Netherlands as the Council of Blood, which handed out over 1,000 death sentences to those involved in the rioting. His tenure as governor kicked off 80 years of turbulence known as the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). Opposition to Spanish rule in the Low Counties coalesced around William of Orange (d. 1584),' one of the few Dutch noble to elude Alba and slip into exile; grandfather of William III of England. The first real success for the Dutch rebels came via somewhat unorthodox methods; privateers licensed by William of Orange, little better than pirates, and derisively dubbed ''Sea Beggars by the Spanish. In April 1572, Elizabeth I of England abruptly expelled all the Sea Beggars from English ports, during a brief thaw in Anglo-Spanish relations. If Elizabeth's aim was to develop better relations with Spain, it accidentally backfired. The Sea Beggars, no longer having refuge, made a desperate attack on the port of Brielle, where they found the Spanish garrison temporarily away; with a break in the Wars of Religion, governor Alba concentrated his forces in the south fearing a French intervention. The ''Sea Beggars ''seized the town and raised the flag of William the Orange. This symbolic victory prompted a chain reaction, emboldening the Dutch to revolt once more, expelling their Spanish garrisons, and declaring for William. The duke of Alba campaigned hard to recover what had been lost, committing appalling atrocities in an attempt to pacify the region by fear. Yet the heroic resistance of the city of Haarlem, which held-out against siege for seven-months before falling, helped stiffen the resolve of the Dutch rebels. By December 1973, Alba's military campaign was causing Philip II to struggle financially, and he was replaced as governor with the more conciliatory Requeséns. But Requeséns' negotiations got bogged down, and in early-1576 he unexpectedly died. In the power vacuum, unpaid Spanish soldiers mutinied, and sacked the city of Antwerp, causing many civilian deaths. This event stiffened the resolve of all 17-provinces of the Low Countries, and William of Orange was able to negotiate an alliance called the Pacification of Ghent (February 1577). Aided by bullion from the New World, Philip II's was able to send a new army under the duke of Parma to the Low Countries in late 1577. It proved a significant turning point. Religious tensions within the 17-provinces, meant that the Catholic south was more inclined to seek compromise with Spain, while for the Protestant north, only complete independence would do. Any hope of solidarity was broken by a fresh wave of radical Protestant violence in 1578, such as publicly burning five Catholic monks to death in Ghent. In early 1579, the southern formed the Union of Arras, for the purpose of defending Catholicism, and soon reconciled with the Spanish crown; the basis for Belgium and Luxembourg as we know them today. A few weeks later, William of Orange and the northern provinces responded with an explicitly anti-Spanish alliance, the Union of Utrecht; the future Dutch Netherlands. In Spanish Belgium, governor Parma consolidated control with admirable skill, subduing most of the remaining rebels through subtle diplomacy, and, when a siege was required, his troops behaved with restrain and any Protestants who wished to leave were given safe-passage. In the Dutch Netherlands, it remained far from clear what type of independence they had in mind. William of Orange was not considered to have the royal stature required to be king. The issue was not settled when William was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1584. The Dutch offered the crown to Elizabeth I of England and Henry III of France; both refused, though both sent military assistance. In 1588, the the seven provinces of the Netherlands declared themselves a republic; the Unified Provinces (1588-1795). It settled into a federal structure: each province was autonomous with an appointed governor or stadholder, with one vote in a combined parliament (Estates General). William's son, Maurice of Orange (d. 1625), was appointed stadholder of two provinces and soon others followed suit; the House of Orange thus became frequently the royal family of a republic. The structure was so progressive for the times that it alarmed England and France, but both nominally recognised the Dutch Netherlands. Meanwhile, Maurice was quick to streamline the government, improve trade, and reforming the Dutch army. He achieved a series of striking successes against the Spanish, thanks largely to the increasingly complicated situation in Europe. Spain was now at war with England beginning with the famous Spanish Armada, as well as at war with France now ruled by the former Protestant Henry IV Bourbon. The independence of the Dutch Netherlands and peace with Spain were not achieved for another half-century, with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which ended the Thirty Years War. In order to fund this ongoing war, the Dutch sent ships far and wide to find new markets, ushering in a Dutch Golden Age (1568–1648), when its trade, science, military, and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. Scottish Reformation When James IV Stewart died at the disastrous Battle of Flodden (September 1513), as part of an Anglo-French war resulting from the Italian Wars, it ushered-in one of the most turbulent periods of Scottish history. The factional struggles during the long minority of infant James V Stewart (1513–42) were given shape by the division between those who adhered to Scotland’s traditional pro-French alignment, and those who were pro-English, determined that the price Scotland paid at Flodden not be repeated. This factionalism and lack of noble support seems to have contributed to the subsequent rout at the Battle of Solway Moss (November 1542). James unexpectedly died shortly afterwards, it was said of a broken heart, six-days after the birth of his only surviving legitimate child, '''Mary Queen of Scots (1542-67). Henry VIII of England was determined to permanently kill-off the threat from the north, by marrying Mary to his own son, the future Edward VI of England. The pro-English faction in Scotland were seduced by Henry's scheme, even signing a marriage treaty on Mary's behalf. But the Scottish regency refused, leading to eight-years of desultory war later dubbed the Rough Wooing (1542-51). Young Mary fled from castle to castle, as English forces tried to hunt her down, until she was finally sent to France, as the intended bride of the heir to the French throne, the future Francis II of France (d. 1560). Brought up in the French court, Mary’s education was not neglected, and she learned literature, rhetoric, music, dance, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and some Greek. When Mary Queen of Scots eventually returned from France in 1561, the political situation on the British Isles had dramatically changed. In England, a Tudor king and a Tudor queen had died, and Mary now had a strong claim to the English throne through her grandmother, Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. Officially the Stuarts were excluded from the English line of succession, but then Elizabeth I of England (d. 1603) had once been excluded too. Meanwhile in Scotland, events had taken an unexpected twist too. From the 1520s, the ideas of Martin Luther began to have influence in Scotland, and soon led to a dramatic confrontation between reformers and the establishment. In 1546, the Zwingli-influenced George Wishart was burnt at the stake by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. In retaliation, Wishart's followers murdered the archbishop, and seized St. Andrews Castle. Here they were besieged by the Scottish government, while John Knox's powerful preaching rapidly gave him the status of leader of the reform movement. The castle finally fell with French help in June 1547, and Knox and the others spent the next 19-months serving as galley-slaves in the French navy. But this harsh treatment only strengthened support for the Protestant cause, as well as the pro-English (anti-French) faction: the persecuting government was that of French regent, Mary of Guise, widow of James V and mother of Mary Queen of Scots; and Mary's marriage to the French king heightened nationalist fears that Scotland would effectively become a French province. Knox meanwhile spent most of the next two decades in exile in England and Calvin's Geneva experiencing real religious reform. In 1559, Knox returned to Scotland to take part in another dramatic clash. Fired by his preaching, an army of reformers marched south from Perth to Edinburgh, sacking monasteries as they went. They took the city but held it only briefly against Scottish government forces, and the next months were spent in spasmodic warfare, with English and French troops arriving to support John Know and Mary of Guise respectively. England’s proximity to Scotland gave it a huge advantage, while France was too preoccupied with the Wars of Religion. In the Treaty of Edinburgh (1560), both France and England agreed to withdraw their troops, leaving the Scots to their own devices; in retrospected the treaty is considered the end of the long-lasting Auld Alliance. In August 1560, a rump of the Scottish parliament ratified a break from the Papacy and establishment of a Presbyterian Reformed Church, in a sitting of questionable legality. Just four month after this event, Mary's husband, Francis II of France, died. In August 1561, the nineteen-year-old widow, Mary Queen of Scots, returned to Scotland; a pious Catholic monarch of a Protestant kingdom. Conflict was inevitable, in a very personal clash between John Knox and Mary; even Knox's own accounts do nothing to conceal his own ferocious rudeness to the young queen. But Mary was no innocent, having seen the reality of religious war in France. She faced him down, and made a success of the first few years of her seven-year-reign: she opted to tolerate the newly established Protestant ascendancy, while defiantly continuing her own Catholic faith in private; and won sufficient support from the Scottish nobles with her charm and sophistication. But Mary had grown-up surrounded by the magnificence of the French court, and her focus often strayed to the greater prize of the English throne, over the internal problems of Scotland. When Mary turned her attention to finding a second husband, Elizabeth I of England cleverly outmaneuvered her rival. Recognising that a Scottish monarch in marriage-alliance with France or Spain would be a danger to England, Elizabeth refused to name her the presumptive heir, but tempted her with the suggestion that a marriage to an English Protestant noblemen would help. Mary settled on the young, handsome, and charming Henry Darnley, another descendant of Henry VII who would strengthen her claim to the English throne. But the marriage was a disaster, and ultimately led to her downfall. Mary refused to shared her crown with her husband, and Darnley quickly grew frustrated with his position as king consort, roaming around Edinburgh drunk and debauched, mouthing-off about not being king, and making enemies. The last years of Mary's reign were a period of extraordinary melodrama. In March 1566, a group of Protestant conspirators murdered Mary's Catholic private secretary David Rizzio, outraged at his control of important correspondence. Mary learned of Darnley's involvement in the plot, which may have intended to depose her, leaving the throne to her husband. Mary's son by Darnley, the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, was born a few months later, but the marriage inevitably broke-down. Mary's poor choice in men now led her to the Earl of Bothwell, a talented soldier who had supported her in the aftermath of the plot. The next murder victim was Darnley himself, killed in an explosion at the former abbey of Kirk o' Field. Bothwell was widely rumoured to have planned the assassination; three months later she married him. Both Protestants and Catholics were shocked that Mary should marry the man accused of murdering her husband. Mary confronted her enemies at Carberry Hill just outside Edinburgh, but her forces quickly melted away. She was captured, imprisoned, and forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James. Mary eventually escaped, fleeing to England and throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy. She seemed to have expected her cousin to help her recover her throne in Scotland, but Mary became a focal point for Catholic conspirators in England. Elizabeth seemed torn between the wisdom of having Mary executed, and that she should do no such thing; Queens were rare, for one to kill another must surely be unwise. After almost 19-years of imprisonment, Mary was accused of treason; in truth she was entrapped in a plot, as England slipped into war with Spain. Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in February 1587, in a grisly botched execution that took three strokes of the axe. Children of Henry VIII in England Henry VIII had succeeded in leaving a male heir, but only just. Nine-year-old, Edward VI Tudor (1547-53 AD), was a frail and sickly child. The short reign of Edward marked the triumph of Protestantism in England. Although his father had severed the English Church from Rome, he had been no reformer, refusing to permit any change to Catholic doctrine or ceremony. The young king's regency council pressed ahead with reform to establish a distinctive Anglican Church, in a restrained Calvinist tradition. This was the time when English cathedrals and churches first had their sculptures, shrines, and stained-glass smashed, and their murals whitewashed. Reformed doctrines were made official, such as the rejection of purgatory so there was no more need for prayers to saints nor for masses for the dead. Thomas Cranmer set himself the task of writing a uniform liturgy in English, The Book of Common Prayer (1549), a literary masterpiece but a political flop, for it failed in its purpose. It succeeded only in antagonizing Roman Catholics, traditionalist Protestants, and zealous Protestants alike; these Protestant zealots commonly known as Puritans would play a significant role in English history, especially during the English Civil War. Edward's reign was plagued social unrest that erupted into a series of armed peasant revolts in 1549; the most serious in Cornwall and Norfolk. These arose from the imposition of religious reforms, but from the beginning of the process of enclosing of common grazing ground by landlords. The English Reformation would have to pass through fire before it was tempered into its final form. Edward died at just fifteen, and was succeeded by his eldest sister Mary I Tudor (1553-58 AD), a staunch Roman Catholic by virtue of her Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon. Her reign began with an attempted coup by her brother's unscrupulous minister, the duke of Northumberland. The innocent victim of his treason was the 15-year-old Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Northumberland's grab for the throne collapsed after nine-days, with overwhelming popular for Mary; Northumberland was beheaded, and the unwitting Jane was imprisoned until it seemed more prudent to have her executed. The central theme of her reign is the restoration of England as a Roman Catholic kingdom. Catholicism was by no means a lost cause when Mary came to the throne, and if she had lived as long as her sister Elizabeth was to live, she probably would have succeeded. Mary's Catholicism was laced with realism, in fear of provoking a counter-reaction: she confirmed the dissolution of the monasteries; married clergy were given a straight choice, to surrender their wives or their priestly ministry; and diehard Protestant leaders were encouraged to go into exile. In thousands of parish churches, the restored Catholic worship was welcomed. There were of course Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake, including the architect of the English Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, as well as the bishops of Gloucester and Rochester. But Mary’s plans were torpedoed as much by her marriage as by the strength of Protestant opposition in England. Mary’s decision to marry Philip II Habsburg of Spain (d. 1598), son of Charles V, proved to be unwise. The marriage was unpopular with her English subjects, due to a general aversion to entanglement in Continental affairs, to patriotic fears that England would be relegated to just another Habsburg dependency, and to the fact the Spanish marriage dragged the kingdom into a war with France that resulted in the loss of Calais in 1558. Protestants were particularly alarmed at aligning the kingdom with intractably Catholic Spain. For her part, Mary was completely enamoured with her husband, but Philip, who was 10 years her junior, did not return her love, see only the political advantage for retaining control of the rebellious Dutch Netherlands. At 37-years-old, Mary was desperate to have a child, who would displace from the line of succession her Protestant younger sister Elizabeth. But she only suffered disappointment and two false pregnancies, not helped by her husband spending as much time as possible on the Continent. Mary fell ill and died in 1558, during an influenza epidemic that also claimed the life of the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. On her deathbed Mary accepted that Elizabeth would be her lawful successor, and was no doubt well aware that her dogmatic efforts had been in vain. Although Mary's rule was ultimately ineffectual and unpopular, the policies of fiscal reform, naval expansion, and colonial exploration that were later lauded as Elizabethan accomplishments were started in her reign. When 25-years-old Elizabeth I Tudor (1558-1603 AD) succeeded her elder sister, England was in need of calm. Elizabeth inherited a number of problems stirred up by her predecessors, the most pressing being the religious discord between Catholic and Protestant factions. The queen acted swiftly to form her government, assembling a core of capable and trustworthy advisers, chief among them William Cecil. He was to serve her with remarkable sagacity and skill for 40 years. One of her first actions was to pass the Act of Supremacy re-establishing the Protestant Church of England, with a slightly revised version of the Edwardian settlement. She sought a moderate Protestantism that would not offend Catholics too greatly, while addressing the desires of English Protestants; she would not tolerate the more extreme Protestants though. At times both Catholics and radical Puritans would be at loggerheads with their new sovereign. In stark contrast to her predecessors, Elizabeth avoided foreign wars if possible, wary of the corrosive effect of costly military expenditure on royal authority. She quickly ended the war with France begun under Mary, accepting terms for the loss of Calais. But a year later, she acted forcefully when French troops tried to intervene in Scotland against John Knox's Protestant rebels, forcing their withdrawal in 1560. Elizabeth's early reign thus concentrated on domestic matters: she tamed parliament with a blend of charm and firmness, and enlisting the power of the Commons as a counterweight to that of the nobility. She also established the Royal Exchange in 1568, as a meeting place for London's merchants and bankers; at this time, London was the conduit for almost all international trade. As a young queen, it was expected that Elizabeth would marry and produce heirs to continue the Tudor line. Despite no shortage of suitors, she of course never married. The reasons for this are not clear. Historians have speculated many theories: her father’s treatment of his wives, including executing of her own mother; or the risk of losing her independence like her sister, who played into the hands of Philip II Habsburg of Spain. There was political advantage in keeping alive the hopes of every bachelor in Europe hoping to win the English throne through marriage. At home, Elizabeth battled male prejudice and attempts to dictate her actions throughout her life. Her response was to played-off male courtiers, forcing them to compete for her royal favour in the manner of courtly love. Marriage negotiations with European princes also constituted a key element in Elizabeth's foreign policy to maintain peace with England's neighbours. Her affections attached themselves a succession of court favourites: her childhood friend Robert Dudley of Leicester in the 1560s, Walter Raleigh in the 1580s, and Robert Devereux of Essex in the 1590s. Meanwhile Elizabeth cultivated the image of herself as the Virgin Queen wedded to her kingdom; a cult of personality grew around her. The first serious problem of Elizabeth I's reign was what to do with her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots (d. 1587), who posed the greatest focus of internal conspiracies to depose her from the throne. During Mary's reign, Elizabeth cleverly outmaneuvered her rival, dangling the possibility of naming her the heir to the English throne. Then in 1567, Scottish lords rose in revolt, imprisoned Mary, and forced her to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI of Scotland and future James I of England. Yet Elizabeth far from rejoiced at the misfortunes of her cousin, expressing fury at the Scottish rebels. Although Elizabeth was concerned with the fate of fellow Protestants, she was deeply reluctant to condone rebels abroad against their monarch, which might encourage rebellions in her own kingdom. A year later, Mary escaped imprisonment and fled to England. Elizabeth reacted with caution, providing comfortable accommodation for Mary in Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire as half-guest half-prisoner. None of the options of what to do with Mary were good: forcibly restoring Mary to the Scottish throne could lead to war with Scotland or civil war in England, while releasing her cousin would allow her to flee to France and stir-up trouble against her. Keeping Mary a prisoner in England seemed the least worst option, but she was soon the focal point for internal plotss. In 1569, there was the most dangerous armed rebellion of Elizabeth's reign. In the still predominantly Catholic north of England, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland rose in revolt with the goal was to depose Elizabeth and replace her with Mary; the Rising of the North (1569-70). The rebels were defeated before they could reach Mary, and over 750 of them were hanged on Elizabeth's orders. This was the last attempt at armed uprising in Elizabeth's reign. Subsequent plots envisaged the assassination of the queen herself, stirred-up by Catholic Spain. .]] The late-16th-century saw a shift in England’s traditional alignment in Europe. For centuries France had been its main enemy, but now the threat was increasingly seen to be Spain. Traditionally the English and Spanish had been on friendly terms. Historians do not believe that this was a deliberate policy by either nation; it simply happened. Contrary to popular histories, religion was not the crucial factor in the decision of Philip II Habsburg of Spain (d. 1598) in launching the Spanish Armada''' (1588). Indeed, Philip made it clear from the start that he wanted Elizabeth on the English throne, as opposed to the pro-French Mary Queen of Scots. The two major areas of contention were the Spanish Dutch Netherlands, and the activities of English pirates in Spanish waters. Protestant exiles, who had fled Mary's attacks, hurried home on Elizabeth's ascension, increasingly radicalised, and became a powerful faction in the English court. There was a great deal of sympathy for the Protestant rebels in the Dutch War of Independence, and Elizabeth covertly supported them. This was seen in Madrid as being very provocative. In 1568 a major incident occurred that effectively meant that Spain and England would never come to terms while Elizabeth was on the throne. In that year, five Spanish ships en-route for the Netherlands were attacked by French Huguenot pirates, and forced to seek refuge in English ports. Elizabeth appropriated the Spanish gold onboard intended to pay Spanish soldiers suppressing the rebels. She underestimated the Spanish reaction, who furiously severed all trade with England and seizing English property in the Netherlands and Spain; Elizabeth retaliated in kind, with the bitter diplomatic standoff lasting for years. Spain also responded in kind, supporting English Catholic plots such as the Ridolfi Plot (1571) intended to depose Elizabeth and make Mary Queen of Scots queen in her place. Complicating matters were the activities of English privateers against Spanish shipping ships across the Atlantic, actively encouraged by Elizabeth. In the 1560s, English sea captains such as John Hawkins (d. 1595) began to enter the Caribbean, who at best infringed Spain's trading monopoly and at worst would rob any Spanish vessel they can overpower. By far the most notorious of these early English privateers was Francis Drake (d. 1596), who in the 1570s made repeated attacks on Spanish shipping and treasure houses on land. Although the raids brought Elizabeth little profit, they caused grave alarm in Spain; Philip II's finances depended on the arrival of trans-Atlantic bullion convoys, and the attacks greatly increased cost of protecting them. Drakes activities escalated during his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580, attacking fat, defenceless vessels in the previously safe Pacific. When Elizabeth knighted Drake on his return, official English attempts to distance themselves from his piracy seemed increasingly insincere. By the time Drake departed Plymouth for the Caribbean in 1585 with a fleet of about thirty ships, his activities looked more like an expedition of war. He and his men spent several months plundering Spanish ships, and sacking the port of Santo Domingo (on modern-day Hispaniola) and Cartagena (in Colombia). It is difficult to say at what point a showdown between England and Spain became unavoidable: the acquisition of Portugal in 1582 made Spain a potentially far more powerful foe; the Throckmorton Plot (1583) where English Catholics attempted to assassinate Elizabeth, in which the Spanish were once again implicated; or perhaps the death of the Dutch rebel leader William of Orange in 1584. In 1585, Elizabeth finally agreed to openly intervene in the Dutch Netherlands, sending an English force of 7,000 men under the earl of Leicester; effectively a declaration of war against Spain. Yet the intervention achieved little; Leicester quarreled with the Dutch and returned after only two-years. Coinciding with Drake's activities in the Caribbean, this final provocation persuaded Philip II that the only way out of both these problems was to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth; the '''Spanish Armada (1588). Well aware of Philip's intention, Elizabeth sent Drake to Spain to interfere in its preparations. The expedition became known as the Singeing the King of Spain's Beard, and succeed in delaying the Armada by a year. Meanwhile, any further plots against Elizabeth herself were thwarted, when the long-imprisoned cousin Mary Queen of Scots was accused on treason and executed in 1587. For Philip, this Catholic martyr was one more justification for his invasion of England. The Spanish strategy was a joint naval and land campaign: it required the main Armada fleet of 130 ships from Spain to secure control of the Channel, allowing the duke of Parma to ferry 26,000 troops from the Spanish Belgium to England. From battling the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spanish had been accustomed to fighting at sea with heavy galleons: their guns fired large cannon balls, devastating at close quarters; and their large crews can overwhelm vessels in the grapple. In contrast, English privateers sailed smaller, swifter caravels, with cannons firing lighter balls over a greater range. Compared to later grand naval battles, the fight with the Armada was strung-out and scrappy. It was during this time that Elizabeth gave her most famous speech while inspectiing of her troops, "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too". The English, under Lord Howard of Effingham, harried the Spanish off Plymouth, off Portland Bill and off the isle of Wight, but did little damage, and the Armada safely reached the port of Gravelines in Spanish Belgium. But Parma's army had been delayed, blockaded in Antwerp by a Dutch admiral. On 8 August, the only significant engagement took place. Having learned the Armada's weaknesses during the skirmishes in the Channel, the nimbler English fleet provoked Spanish fire while staying out of range. When the Spanish ran-out of shot, the English closed, and did some serious damage; five Spanish ships were lost and many other damaged. The battered Spanish Armada escaped to the north, and attempted to return to Spain around the north of Scotland and into the Atlantic. Unfamiliar with the Gulf Stream and struck by heavy storms, the fleet floundered and were driven onto the rocks, mainly on the coast of Ireland. In the end, only 67 of 130 ships limped back to Spain. As it turned out, the English did little better: a typhus epidemic swept through the crews killing many; others were left unpaid due to Elizabeth's financial difficulties; and she even hanged one company who went to London to protest. The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) would drag-on for many more years. The English tried to press the advantage with their own Counter-Armada expeditions in 1589, 1595 and 1597, but all faired no better than the Spanish Armada. The Spanish responded in 1596, 1597, and 1601; the latter intended to support rebels in Ireland. The war became deadlocked and was brought to an end by Elizabeth and Phillip’s successors with the Treaty of London (1604). Elizabeth's 45-year reign became celebrated as the Elizabethan Era, a period of boundless English optimism, and the apogee of the English Renaissance. The era is most famous for theatre, as William Shakespeare (d. 1616), Christopher Marlowe (d. 1593) and many others broke free from the snobbery of the past. Edmund Spenser is commonly recognised as England's greatest poet in the two centuries since Chaucer. And in science, Francis Bacon (d. 1626) pioneered the development of the scientific method and remained influential through the Scientific Revolution. The final years of Elizabeth’s life were difficult, when a series of deaths among her senior adviser including William Cecil plunged her into a severe depression. Of course the great issue was the question of succession. Of course she never married, and made no effort to nominate a successor until the very end. Her choice of successor would have profound implications for the future of both England and Scotland; her cousin, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James VI Stuart of Scotland. When the queen died in 1603, it was as if the critics of her style of autocratic rule had been waiting patiently for her to step down. Tudor Conquest of Ireland Ever since Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the late-12th-century, kings of England had among their titles, Lord of Ireland. Three centuries later the political reality of that claim was little more than an illusion. In the wake of a series of calamities in the 14th-century, such as Gaelic-Irish rebellion, Scottish invasion, and the Black Death, the territories of the Anglo-Normans had been confined to the south and east. With England then distracted by the Hundred Years' War, Ireland was simply not a strategic priority. Beyond "the Pale", the area held directly by the English crown around Dublin, the authority of the government was tenuous. The Gaelic-Irish were effectively totally outside English jurisdiction. Meanwhile the great Anglo-Norman families, that once symbolised English power, had now achieved a high degree of independence. They enforced their own law, raised their own armies, made alliances with the Gaelic-Irish, adopted Gaelic language and culture, and resented royal interference in their territories. Over three centuries, the Anglo-Normans became, if not exactly "more Irish than the Irish themselves", certainly no longer truly English; henceforth usually referred to as the Old English. The situation worsened further during the Wars of the Roses, when direct English authority virtually disappeared. Successive monarchs had no money to spare to protect their interest in Ireland, and instead appointed one of the three greatest Anglo-Norman lords as royal governor (Lord Deputy of Ireland); the earls of Kildare, Desmond (Cork) or Ormond (Kilkenny) - most often Kildare. Then in 1485, a new era for Ireland began when Henry VII Tudor won the Battle of Bosworth Field, ending the Wars of the Roses. The Tudor Conquest of Ireland (1529-1603) spanned all five Tudor monarchs and was long unintended, even though it constituted the dynasties' most ambitious undertaking. Although the Old English had predominantly been for the Yorkists during the civil war, Henry VII was content to keep the earl of Kildare, Gerald Mór FitzGerald (d. 1513), as royal governor. However the king's trust in him was severely tested when two different pretenders to the English throne launched their bids from Ireland. Henry pardoned the earl of Kildare for this, but did not allow him to continue as governor, installing instead the trusted English advisors, Lord Poynings. But Poynings’s administration required English troops and quickly proved too expensive, so FitzGerald was reinstated after just two years. By the time he was succeeded by his son, Gerald Óg FitzGerald (d. 1534), the FitzGeralds were openly acting as rulers of all Ireland. In February 1534, Henry summoned Gerald Óg to London to answer various charges. A few months later, rumours that Gerald Óg had been executed in the Tower of London prompted the open rebellion of his son "Silken" Thomas FitzGerald; in fact Gerald Óg had probably died of natural causes. Thomas had wrongly assumed that his cause would attract overwhelming support, in particular from Catholics. The English Reformation from 1533 caused widespread alarm in Ireland. In contrast to the situation in England, the Catholic clergy in Ireland, who refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church, attracted popular support from both the Gaelic Irish and Old English. Even those in the Pale, who were genuinely loyal to the crown, viewed Protestant doctrine as heresy. However, as would happen time and again in Irish rebellions, a lack of political unity played against Silken Thomas' rebellion and into English hands. The powerful earl of Ormond (Kilkenny) remained loyal to the crown, and the resulting fighting allowed an English army to land in Dublin. One by one Thomas' allies made their separate peace with Henry VIII, and Thomas himself surrendered in August 1535; although promised leniency, he was condemned to a traitors death. Silken Thomas' revolt caused Henry to pay more attention to Irish matters. In 1541, he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a full kingdom, and implemented the policy of surrender-and-regrant; Gaelic Irish lords would give-up their lands to the king, and immediately receive them back, along with secure title protected by English feudal law. This worked remarkably well at least for a while; one by one lords submitted, including the O'Neills of Tyrone, probably the most powerful Gaelic Irish family in all of Ireland. In practice, the lords of Ireland accepted their new privileges but carried on as they had before. Meanwhile, Henry VIII expanded the administration using the proceeds of lands confiscated from rebels and the Church. In contrast to England where Henry VIII had largely won the support of the nobility by selling them Church lands, in Ireland lands were mostly sold to newly arrived royal officials, who became known as the New English. The New English viewed the Gaelic Irish as barbarous, and the goal of royal administrators was to civilise them without it costing the treasury too much money; the Old English were viewed little better. This of course drove the Old English into common cause with the Gaelic Irish, despite the old ethnic rivalries of medieval Ireland. Under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, the English in Ireland tried a number of solutions to pacify and Anglicise the country. In the 1550s, the midland counties of Laois and Offaly were confiscated, and the first Plantation of Ireland ''occurred; the settlement of loyal English families on the confiscated land. This was only a very limited success; in practice the cost of protecting the colonists from the dispossessed was ruinous. Rebellions were endemic in Ireland, such as those of Shane O’Neill (1559-67), of the Fitzgeralds of Desmond (1569–73), and of Desmond again (1579–83). The English response was invariably military campaigns of astonishing brutality. One of the most notorious English commanders was Humphrey Gilbert (d. 1583), who treated all Irish without quarter, including women and children. He even devised a gruesome spectacle to cow the rebel supporters; a path of decapitated heads along which relatives of the victims were made to walk. By 1590, 27-years after she came to power, Elizabeth had largely subdued the Irish in Munster, Leinster, and Connaught. But there was one great obstacle to English dominance in Ireland, in a province that would become synonymous with the conflict between the two islands. Ulster was the Gaelic-Irish stronghold of Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone (d. 1616). In a rapidly change world, O'Neill was a great survivor, who had spent much of his career trying to work within the English ascendancy, for which he had been rewarded with position and lands. His ire was raised by the advance of the royal administration into Ulster, by means of a new policy; large Irish lordships were to be broken-up into more modest estates, that would not be strong enough on their own to ever threaten rebellion. It was first applied in Monaghan in 1591, and soon after in Longford and Cavan as well. The outbreak of rebellion in 1594 was at first confined to Fermanagh, where Hugh Maguire (d. 1600) tried to drive-out the English troops from his territory. The intervention of Hugh O’Neill was expected on the side of the crown forces, but instead he joined the rebels along with his brother-in-law Red Hugh O’Donnell of Donegal (d. 1602); the '''Nine Years’ War' (1594-1603 AD). Trained in the English style of warfare, O'Neill and his allies started to push back the English forces from Ulster and along its borders. When an English army sent north to lift the siege of Monaghan Fort, it suffered a stinging defeat at the Battles of Clontibret (March 1595), against a force more professional than Elizabeth's commanders had ever encountered in Ireland. Another dazzling Irish victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford (August 1598) prompted uprisings elsewhere in the country. What had been a war for regional autonomy became one for the control of Ireland, that brought the power of the crown to the point of collapse. Elizabeth sent an additional 17,000 English troops to Ireland, and replaced her commander twice, before finally finding a man capable of turning the tide of this great Irish rebellion, Lord Mountjoy. The first thing Mountjoy did was to launch naval incursions into O'Neill's Ulster heartland, in order to keep the Irish forces tied-down. He then set about pacifying the rest of the country, with some success, especially in the south. Meanwhile in the midst of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), O'Neill's appealed to Philip II of Spain for military aid against their common enemy, citing their shared Catholicism. Philip however proved a cautious ally, sending just 4,500 Spanish troop in 1601 after much delay. But the expedition was plagued by bad luck. The Spanish were forced by bad weather forced to landed at Kinsale, virtually the southern tip of Ireland. As Mountjoy's forces converged to besiege the Spanish at Kinsale, the Ulster lords made an epic march south. But a rash attempt to surprise the English by night at the Battle of Kinsale (October 1602) proved disastrous; the Irish were routed and the Spanish sundered. O’Neill held out in Ulster for more than a year but finally submitted in March 1603, just a few days after Queen Elizabeth’s death. Considering the cost of the rebellion, James I Stewart treated O'Neill and his allies with relatively generously; they were allowed to keep their titles and some of their lands. However, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, James barred Catholics from all public office, and it became much harder for them to appear loyal to the crown. Fearing being charged with treason, the O’Neills, O’Donnells, Maguires, and other families fled Ireland for the Continent on the 14 December 1607; the Flight of the Earls. Hugh O'Neill toured Europe seeking foreign support to restarting the rebellion in Ireland, but, with peace between England and Spain since 1604, it proved impossible; he died in Rome in 1616. In the wake of the flight, the people of Ireland were left scattered, divided, and leaderless. The lands of Ulster were given to English and Scottish families in the first Plantation of Ulster. This proved the most successful British settlement in Ireland, because the planters included British tenants and labourers as well as landlords; social engineering on a grand scale. Elizabeth’s Irish policy had reduced the country to obedience for the first time since the invasion of Henry II, but it was plainly evident that the Reformation had failed in Ireland. The Gaelic Irish and Old English increasingly defined themselves as Catholic in opposition to the Protestant New English. One late-16th-century chronicler estimated that Dublin had only twenty Irish-born householders attending Protestant church services. If the crown couldn’t enforce its will in the Pale, where people were genuinely loyal to the crown, then the rest of the country was entirely lost. One problem was language difference. The idea of preaching and translating the Bible into the people's own language was fundamental to the success of Protestantism. Yet, the Protestant Church of Ireland was culturally English, and clerics made little effort to learn the native Gaelic language, which remained the majority language until well into the 1800s. For instance, the Reformation had succeeded in Wales due to a native Welsh movement in the Welsh language. Another problem was that English rule in Ireland was not firmly established until 1603, when the Catholic Counter-Reformations was already well underway. Irish Catholic priests returned from their education on the Continent with a firm intellectual grounding in arguing against Protestantism. The failure of the Reformation in Ireland would leave a poisonous legacy, in a Europe where religion was a battleground. In the wake of events such as the reign of Queen Mary I or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France or the attempted invasion of the Spanish Armada, religious loyalty and political loyalty were increasingly seen as one-and-the-same. The New English would never be assimilated into Irish society, as the Anglo-Normans had been. Nevertheless the native Irish, both Gaelic and Old English, remained the majority landowners in the country until two catastrophic periods of civil war in the 17th-century: the Eleven Years' War (1641-53) and Jacobite War in Ireland (1689–91). Autocratic Rule in Russia Even after Ivan the Great, Russia remained territorially ill-defined and exposed. A strong centralized Russian state would be truly consummated during the long reign of his grandson, Ivan IV Rurikovich (1533-84), better known in the West as Ivan the Terrible, although his sobriquet Grozny translated more accurately as "the fearsome". Ivan inherited the throne at just three-years-old. The next few years saw the boy Tsar at the centre of a violent struggle between factions of boyars; Russia's landed nobility. This experience shaped Ivan's his subsequent determination to clip the wings of his nobles. In 1547, Ivan reached his majority at the age of 16 and took the reins of power. That year, he also married his first wife Anastasia Romanov. The early years of his reign were very constructive. A program of wide-ranging reforms and modernisation produced a revised law code, reformed tax collection, strengthened local and national administration, introduced the first printing press, regulated the obligations of the boyars, and created a standing army. The immediate goal was to strengthen the state in preparation for a series of campaigns to the east and south, taking over territory formerly controlled by the Mongol Golden Horde, and carrying Russian power towards the Ural and Caucasus mountains. In 1555, Ivan had one of the countries most famous symbols constructed, St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, to commemorate his victory over the Kazan khanate and winning control of the whole length of the Volga River. Ivan was less successful in the west, where he started the Livonian War (1558–1583) against Poland-Lithuania, in an attempt to gain access to the Baltic Sea and its major trade routes. This would be a long, costly, and largely fruitless struggle throughout his own life and beyond, an early bout of the century-long battle for the Baltic against Poland and Sweden that would only begin to turn in Russia's favour under Peter the Great. Ivan's reign seemed to reach a turning point with the death in 1560 of his first wife Anastasia, who had been a moderating influence on his volatile character. The Tsar suspected that she had been poisoned, and evidence suggests he may well have been right. With the Livonian War starting to go badly, some on the boyars turned against Ivan and joined Poland in an attempt to overthrown him. Ivan responded by demanding vast autocratic powers, including the ability to execute and confiscate the estates of traitors without interference from the boyar council. He used these powers to create a vast royal estate called the Oprichnina ''in 1565, which he would use as a base of wealth and military power. This allowed Ivan to establish a completely loyal force that grew to 6,000 strong, a quasi personal army / secret police to root out anyone who opposed the Tsar. There followed a series of bloody purges, accompanied by executions of calculated cruelty, that peaked in 1570. In that year, Ivan personally led his troops against the wealthy city of Novgorod, which was suspected of planning to defect to Poland. Novgorod was brutally sacked and several thousand civilians were killed, ending the city's golden age as a trading hub. A devout Orthodox Christian, Ivan in his old age would send money to monasteries with a list of more than 3,000 men and women for whom the monks were to pray; the name were victims he had executed. So Ivan the "Terrible" is not a completely inappropriate name. Towards the end of his life, Ivan then set the stage for the decades of chaos that would follow his reign. In a fit of rage, he beat his pregnant daughter-in-law into a miscarriage for wearing immodest clothing. Upon learning of this, his eldest son got into a furious argument him, during which Ivan fractured his skull with a staff; the only viable heir died a few days later. Upon his death in 1584, Ivan was thus succeeded by his feeble-minded younger son Feodor (1584-98). Power passed to Feodor's brother-in-law '''Boris Godunov' (d. 1605), ruling first as regent and then as Tsar in his own right. Boris' early reign was modestly successful. He recovered from Sweden some towns lost during the Livonian War, and strengthened the new Russian presence in Siberia. He also dealt effectively with a conspiracy by disaffected boyars (Russian nobles) to place Feodor's infant brother Dmitry on the throne; the young boy was exiled, and died in 1591, perhaps assassinated, perhaps of natural causes. On the darker side, the process restricting the legal rights and freedom-of-movement of peasants, which had been ongoing for decades, reach permanent formal codification in the 1590s. Russian serfdom meant peasants were tied to the land in which they were born, passed like property in real-estate transactions, and the measure of a nobles wealth included the number of serf they owned; it would prevail in Russia all the way down until 1861. The troubles of Boris' reign began soon after Feodor's death in 1598. As a Tsar of questionable legitimacy, the rest of his reign was plagued by nobles scheming to regain power and privileges lost under Ivan the Terrible. These took the unusual form of a trio of false Dimitris, pretenders claiming to be Feodor's deceased younger brother, and often backed by foreign powers. Russia descended into a decade of anarchy and dynastic chaos, which played out against the backdrop of renewed war with Poland-Lithuania, that saw Polish armies twice occupy Moscow. Eventually, the Russian nobility rallied to a unified national defence, and elected one Tsar who they could all agree to follow; a distant relation of Ivan the Terrible, Michael Romanov. It marked the end of the Rurikovich Dynasty (882-1613) which had ruled Russia for over 700-years, and the beginning of the Romanov Dynasty (1613-1917) which would rule all the way down until the Russian Revolution. Rivals in the Age of Discovery Throughout the 16th century, Spain and Portugal had a virtual monopoly on the Age of Discovery. The Portuguese Empire cornered the profitable trade in eastern spices, via the long sea route round Africa to India and then through the Strait of Malacca to the Far East. Following victory over the Muslims at the Battle of Diu (1509), they rapidly secured Portuguese hegemony over the India Ocean. In India, the island of Bombay was ceded to the Portuguese in 1534, and an early presence on Sri Lanka steadily increased during the century. In China, good relations were established when the Portuguese aided the Chinese in eliminating coastal pirates. The Ming court finally gave consent to leasing the island of Macau to them in 1557. in Japan, a state of civil war was highly beneficial to the Portuguese, as competing warlords sought to attract its trade; they were especially interested in muskets. The Portuguese were granted the tiny port of Nagasaki in 1571. With direct trade between China and Japan restricted due to the activity of Japanese pirates. the Portuguese were able to fill this commercial vacuum and establish a highly lucrative triangular trade: Chinese silks were bought, sold to the Japanese for silver, which was then used to buy more silks for the return journey to Europe. Nevertheless challenges continued, especially from the Ottoman Truks under Suleiman the Magnificent: there was a failed attempt to seize Diu in India in 1538; an attempt to recover the Persian Gulf in 1554; a series of assaults on several Portuguese positions in India in the 1560s; and an unsuccessful siege of Malacca in 1568. Despite the Ottomans being at the peak of their power, the Portuguese were just too well entrenched by this time, and for all the effort the Turks could only secured Aden and control of the Red Sea. Of course, the discovery of Brazil in 1500 meant the Portuguese Empire spanned both hemispheres, but they were slow to exploit the territory that was named from Brazilwood, a redwood much in demand for dye. With a population of less than 2 million, and her focus on eastern trade routes, as well as a growing involvement in the African slave-trade, it was not until 1533 that steps were taken to colonize this vast territory. The Portuguese king's solution was to dividing the coastline into fifteen large strips, and grant them as a hereditary fiefs to fifteen courtiers. A decade later only two colonies had made any success of this venture. Relations between Spain and Portugal were peaceful for most of the 16th century. Each had its own half of the world to exploit, with the dividing line of Tordesillas accepted on both sides. It therefore suited the Iberian neighbours to secure friendly terms through a series of marriage alliances. Manuel I Aviz of Portugal (1495-1521) married three successive wives from the Spanish royal family, while his son John III Aviz (1521-37) married the sister of Charles V Habsburg and Charles marries John's sister. The situation changed dramatically in 1578 when John's grandson, Sebastian of Portugal (1557-78), died rather recklessly fighting the Muslims in Morocco. The claim of Philip II of Spain was as strong as anyone's, and one he was determined to pursue. A Spanish army marched into Portugal, and Philip was recognised as king by the Portuguese parliament in 1580, not just unifying the Iberian Peninsula but adding the substantial Portuguese Empire to his holdings. Philip showed considerable skill in making himself acceptable to the Portuguese, promising to preserve Portugal's autonomy, thus merging the crowns rather than the kingdoms. His son and grandson were less tactful, eventually leading to the Portuguese Restoration War (1640-68). Other European nations outside the Iberian Peninsula looked on enviously at the wealth that Spain and Portugal derived from their empires, especially the spices of the east. France was the first to seek a new western route to the same pot of gold. The Treaty of Tordesillas dividing the world between Spain and Portugal quickly became obsolete. The famous quip of Francis I of France, "Show me Adam's will!", neatly expresses the attitude of other governments. In 1534, the French king sent Jacques Cartier (d. 1557) on the first of three voyages to look for a northwest passage linking the Atlantic with the Pacific. He failed, but explored and mapped the great inlet of the St Lawrence River and claimed it for France. Rowing his longboats up the river, he discovered a Iroquois Indian village at the site of present-day Quebec City; he named the region Canada from the Indian word Kanata ''meaning "village". He explored up the river as far as an island occupied by Huron Indians. They made him welcome and took him to the highest point on their island, which he named Montreal (Royal Mount). On his final voyaga, Cartier attempted to found a colony but it came to nothing. Yet his discoveries prompt the interest of French fishing fleets and later fut traders to the legion. In 1608, one of the earliest permanent settlements was founded at what is now Quebec City, which would become the capital of New France (1534–1763). While the French were searching for a way north of the Americas to the Far East, the English believed that there may be a route north of Russia. In 1553, Hugh Willoughby (d. 1554) set-out from Thames with three ships to search for this supposed northeast passage. As they pass Greenwich Palace, they saluted Edward VI of England, but this put a gloss on great incompetence and lack of preparation. Willoughby with two ships and crew were never seen alive again; with no suitable clothing or provisions, they all starved and frooze to death. Their gruesome end is known because the ships, including Willoughby's journal, were found by Russian fishermen the following spring. The third ship however was separated from the others in a storm, and safely reached the Russian port of Archangel. The captain Richard Chancellor (d. 1556) was warmly welcomed and invited to visit Ivan the Terrible in Moscow. While Willoughby was perishing, Chancellor spent the winter at the Tsar's lavish court. He returned to English the next year, bringing with him a favourable trade agreement between England and Russia; Western Europe barely knew of Russia at the time. A flourishing trade with Russia was inadvertently the result of England's quest for the northeast passage. The other activity of all nations with access to the Atlantic was '''privateering'. The practice dated to at least the 13th century, when privately owned armed merchant ships could legitimately take vessels that were deemed pirates or deemed an enemy by the government. Queen Elizabeth of England most famously encouraged the development of such a "supplementary navy", while publicly denying she had anything to do with the actions of such independents. But all nations were involved: Englishmen Francis Drake (d. 1596) and Walter Raleigh (d. 1618), Frenchman Jean-François Roberval (d. 1560), and Dutchman Pieter van der Does (d. 1577). Privateers cruised the Caribbean or the coast of Spain, trying to intercept treasure fleets. The Iberian Union in 1580 was ultimately to the determent of the Portuguese Empire, as Spain's enemies became Portugal's enemies, just when English and French captains were honing their skills. But the first threat came from the Dutch Netherlands, who had been engaged in a struggle for independence against Spain since 1568. In 1595, the Dutch captain Cornelis de Houtman (d. 1599) became the first man to break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade, by sailing from Europe around Africa to the East Indies. The early 17th-century would see more permanent intruders in both the Americas and the far east. Category:Historical Periods